Two Strikes; No Outs

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I’ve been in favor of the Hollywood strike for a while now, but for each day that passes, I hear something that strengthens my resolve. For example, did you know that actors make an average of $28,000 a year? And if you don’t remember how averages work, they add up all the yearly earnings of actors, including the ones who make over $30,000,000, divide by the number of them, and you get a figure: $28,000, around minimum wage. Meanwhile, streaming services are pulling all kinds of fuckery to keep from paying residuals. Writers have it worse because studios hire a writer’s room, then fire them before the scripts are finished, and I believe that absolves them of residuals. As a writer, I’m glad I never made it because, if I have to go out stumping for peanuts every few months, I wouldn’t be enjoying my craft or my life.

Now that I’ve got this out of the way, I saw something that really put actors’ plight in stark relief. I like to have bad TV shows or movies on in the background while I draw—I need the noise, and I really don’t pay attention. The one I picked this morning was BAD. The story was terrible, the dialogue was terrible, the lead and supporting actors wouldn’t have passed auditions for a high school production of Our Town. The cinematography (or what I saw when I looked up) looked like it was filmed through a plastic grocery bag. The lead had no charisma, and the plot twist at the end was so unbelievably stupid I was haunted by it. The budget was about as much money as I have in my checking account (i.e., I’m not broke, but if I have to go to the hospital I will be).

And yet, the top-billed actor in the movie, like Anthony Hopkins was top-billed in The Silence of the Lambs, was Morgan Freeman. Let that sink in for a moment. This was not a B-movie. It was a D, maybe a D-minus. There are a couple of explanations for this. Maybe he owed the director a favor. Maybe he had signed a contract that locked him into it. Most likely, it was the same reason Harrison Ford made an Indiana Jones movie at eighty years old: he needed the money.

Morgan Freeman has way more money than me, I know that. I know he gets paid more cash than I’ve ever seen for each role that he plays (and his presence in this rubbish film probably used up most of the budget). But I learned something when I went to Doha ten years ago. You expand. Kate and I went from a thousand-square-foot apartment to three thousand square feet. When we returned three years later to 1,200 square feet, we couldn’t fit. Likewise, prior to moving there, we had some debt, but mostly we were living comfortable off of her good salary and generous stipend from her father (which he gave to her as a way of getting out of paying taxes because he’s wealthy, and that’s what wealthy people do). We moved to Doha, where we didn’t pay rent, everything was cheaper, her salary went up dramatically for overseas pay, and since Doha was considered part of a war zone (it was not), we also got hazard pay. When we returned to the United States, all we had left was the salary and stipend, and we went broke. It took a couple of years to stabilize our finances (then she kicked me out).

Before I got married, I lived on half of what I’m making now (about two-thirds adjusted for inflation), and these days, I’m spending slightly more than I make, mostly because of the geriatric cat. You get used to it, is what I’m saying.

Imagine being one of the most acclaimed actors—and an actor of color no less. Imagine you played God in a big-budget Jim Carrey movie. Imagine starring in a movie (The Shawshank Redemption) that’s so iconic, everyone wants you to narrate your life. Imagine being a meme. Imagine not being able to find work anymore, and being broke. Imagine having to play a small important character in this turd of a movie. He did a good job, but clearly his heart wasn’t in it.

Part of the reasons actors are paid a lot, even the little guys, is a lot of time passes between projects, unless you’re Antonio Banderas, who appears to make a movie a month. I don’t know who his bookie is. Scarlett Johannsen sued Disney because Black Widow was mostly streamed, and her contract only covered theater sales. Nobody feels sorry for the actors, despite that most of them are barely getting by. This is exactly what the millionaires and billionaires in the studios want you to feel.

Acting is a hard job, even for the stars. Can you imagine being one of the Marvel’s Chrises and have to work out for hours a day and have a strict diet just so you can do a two-second shirtless scene? Does anyone remember when Chris Pratt was fat? He will never enjoy a donut again.

Meanwhile, execs are getting paid millions when product that’s fattening them up is not getting adequately recognized for their efforts. Do not listen to them. There are millionaires on both sides, but the difference is, on one side, they’re showing solidarity (except for Matt Damon).

I haven’t even brought up AI, which fills me with rage as a writer and artist and as someone who doesn’t want to see his favorite actors digitized.

In a few months, we’re going to see the movies and TV shows in the pipeline run out. A lot of people, including people I know, are mad that there will be no new content. To which I say, out of the dozens of streaming services out there, are you really going to tell me you’ve seen all the TV shows and movies? What about all the TV shows and movies you own? Read a book. Go to the park. This is not quarantine anymore.

Oh yeah, also in the awful movie was Peter Stormare for about one minute. He chewed scenery like we’ve come to expect from him. I suspect he didn’t even know he was in a movie.

Coffee Shopaholic

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Twenty years, when I lived New York adjacent, there was a spot on Eighth Street near Astor Place where you could look at a Starbuck’s, turn to your left and see another Starbuck’s, and turn to your right to see another Starbuck’s. It was like you entered some kind of vortex. There was a Starbuck’s in the Container Store when I worked there. When I visited Shane in Binghamton, the only place we could go was Starbuck’s. In the early nineties, it was a magical, distant place I’d only hear about in whispers, but by the late nineties, it was like mold.

It’s been years since I’ve been to a Starbuck’s. (Except for in airports because they give you no other options.) I prefer the smaller places that don’t bust unions, and they don’t serve you coffee that tastes like it’s been on the burner for a month. I found one a short distance from my place, and I’ve started going there regularly.

I bring one of my three sketchbooks and something to draw and color with because I work best in noise and the occasional distraction. I don’t see a lot of repeat customers, except for one.

The cafe consists of some booths and two couches with tables in front of them. I always sit in one corner of the couch. On the other corner is always a customer, about my age and not dressed in athleisurewear like every other woman who patronizes the place, and she is there every Saturday morning. She tends to sit on the other side of my looong sofa, and she spends all of her time drinking her iced beverage and reading her phone.

When I saw her this past Saturday, I thought about saying hi (not ask her out), but I got the yips. I’m naturally shy, I’ve got a mean resting bitch face, you can’t tell I’m not dating just by looking at me, and the most important part: I am pathologically afraid of being a creep.

I’m large, with hair that doesn’t stay nice and a beard that grows back as soon as it’s trimmed, my inability to start a conversation, and the aforementioned mean resting bitch face. I assume the sour looks on faces I see on the sidewalk is because they’re disgusted with me, as opposed to the fact that nobody ever looks happy on the sidewalk. This is called confirmation bias.

So my therapist and I talked about it, and she pointed out that if she were creeped out by me, she wouldn’t sit on the same sofa, over and over. She may not want to be a friend, but she’s definitely not disgusted with me.

My homework is to say hi, and if she is friendly, tell her my name. Maybe even get hers. I see my therapist once a month, giving me four Saturdays to get past the yips.

Wish me luck!

Kitten Season in Albania

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In my old writing group, we had a contest too see which of us could write the most words. The winner got a sticker. If you looked at Kat’s laptop, she was covered in stickers. It’s a free-write—you can talk about how much you hate writing for ten minutes, and you’re still qualified to win. This is surprisingly coherent for a free-write, but that’s the way I roll. The prompt was the phrase, “It was kitten season in Albania.”

It was kitten season in Albania, and no matter how much you sprayed, they were everywhere. And you know what they say about kittens: if you see one, there are dozens around that you can’t actually see. I had a particular problem with the kittens during my stay in Albania as part of my top-secret diplomatic mission with the State Department, and that was this: I had a lot of knickknacks. A LOT of knickknacks. And if there’s one thing that a kitten loves, it’s destroying the knickknacks. There was an owl that my grandmother had given me—she was Albanian, which is how I scored the sweet undercover gig—and a kitten came out of nowhere, bit its head off, knocked the remains to the floor, and disappeared into a portal. Fucking kittens. I don’t know where these portals go, but I vow one day to find out.

I called the kitten exterminators the other day—don’t worry, they don’t actually kill the kittens—they just round them up and put them into a vacuum cleaner to be sent to the kitten retail outlet in Bangor, Maine. They have a portal expert whose job is specifically to figure out where the kittens go after they create their swathes of destruction and adorable, adorable mayhem. We have theories—some of us think that it is a beautiful, sunny world of fluffiness and cotton candy. Others believe—as do I—that it is a dark, hell dimension full of evil and stuff. This makes as much sense to me as anything, being that I really, really loved my Albanian grandmother’s owl statue. I wanted to kill that kitten, but it looked at me with those big kitten eyes and mewed a tiny kitten mew, and it was all over. I’d adopt the little fucker, but I have other owl statues that my Albanian grandmother gave to me. Many owl statues. There was an army of them. I think she used them to unleash dark, Albanian magic upon the world. So who knows, maybe the kittens are a force for good, destroying those talismen of evil. Or maybe they’re just tchotchkes. What kind of magic is dark, Albanian magic? I’ve heard of Dark Macedonian magic, and dark Lithunanean magic, but never dark Albanian magic. I don’t know who spread that rumor, really. I think it was my mother, who never did like her mother-in-law. But still, labeling someone as an evil Albanian magic-user seems a little harsh, don’t you think? Maybe there was a grain of truth about it? I mean, there was all the chanting and the weird lights that eminated from Grandma’s room late at night when she thought everyone was asleep. I wasn’t asleep because the prescriptions I was on for my insomnia never actually worked. The ones for psychosis, however, were magic. Just like my grandmother. And that kitten. Fucking kitten.

Ginger Rap: A Eulogy

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It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I’m putting my current comic, Ginger Rap, on hiatus. It’s not that I don’t have time, it’s not because I lost an interest in drawing, it’s not because it sucks. (Pages 1, 2, and 5 are really good, but it’s not working.) And it’s not because someone read my first color comic, “Haute,” and realized what a genius I was. It’s because it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to.

I decided to illustrate this comic for two reasons. First, I wanted to make a comic. This was not my first comic, and I really enjoyed it. In fact, about a year ago, before my renaissance, I remember thinking that it would be fun to do another comic. Too bad I didn’t draw anymore. Here I am, with fifty sheets of Bristol board, ready to have some fun. The second was that if I drew a lot and a lot of the same characters, over and over, I’d be a better artist.

So here I am, treating the comic as a duty, and wanting to draw bigger pictures, while not enjoying the quality of art I was putting out. I like simple comic art. It’s the reason The Kindly Ones has always been my favorite Sandman story, and why I will buy anything Matt Wagner illustrates. However, my art has been oversimple, unlike the art in my sketchbooks. I had forgotten everything I had just learned about anatomy when I penciled and inked the pages, and I did it because I was rushing. My comic book art has been getting worse.

It’s time to step away and do a post-mortem. Even though each page had been penciled, painted, and inked, they look like sketches. Meanwhile, my sketchbooks have hardly any sketches, rather complete pieces of art. I’ve been treating the whole page like the medium, when I should be making each panel art.

In addition, I’ve been learning a few things, I bought a hand model (first thing I did was flip the cats off because I am a child) and a book on anatomy and a book on perspective. I’m experimenting on some tricks to give my characters more depth.  

So I’m not quitting. But if I spent some time away just practicing and learning, it would be really jarring for the art quality to leap like that between pages 8 and 9. Is it time to put Ginger Rap to rest and move on? I’m really looking forward to the last page, though. That’s why I said hiatus and not canceled.

But you see what I’ve been doing, right? Totally worth it.

Tales from the Cubicle

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*thunder and organ music*

Gather round, boys and GHOULS, for I bring you DOUBLE the frights in tonight’s chilling tale: “Terror in Team Room 5.”

*lightning*

It seemed like such a normal day. The sky was overcast, and the air was warm, but not too warm. It was more of a cuddle than a scalding. I had done a great deal of work that day, I made a drawing I can’t wait to share, and I gathered in Team Room 5 with the managers and the giant TV to talk to the editors and those who couldn’t make it that day.

Then there’s Brandy (not her real name). Brandy’s desk is fifty yards from Team Room 5, but she Zooms into the weekly meeting. I’m sure there’s a good reason. She’s our staff influencer, and there might be some reason she can’t leave her desk. Whatever.

The meeting was pretty typical, until three-quarters through, when a figure stepped into Brandy’s blurred background. I was watching the editor-in-chief at that moment, so it took Clara (not her real name) whispering at me around the Vice President of Publishing for me to notice. When I looked over Brandy’s shoulder, I saw me.

My height, my build, my bad posture, my complexion, my burgundy T-shirt, my jeans, and platinum blond or white hair were all there. There was no way to communicate to Brandy while he just stood there, shuffling around, giving me the heebie-jeebies.

The Vice President of Publishing, visibly bored, got the editors to stop talking and set us free. After confirming on Brandy’s screen that I was still there, Clara and I raced to her desk. We were between my doppelganger and the elevator, so there was no way he was getting out. And yet, he was nowhere to be seen.

We asked Brandy who he was, and she told us she never got a look at his face. Who was he? Where did he go? We will never know. Watch the background. Always watch the background.

Well, that tale was TWICE the scares! Hahahahaha! It was TWO frightening! Hahahahaha! That’s a tale you enjoy with a hot cup of COPY! Hahahahaha! It gives a whole new meaning to “talking to yourself”! Hahahahaha! I hope you enjoyed this DOS of horror and tune in next time to Tales from the Cubicle. Hahahahaha!

*thunder and organ music*

Create Expectations

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When I started writing again after a long hiatus, I was working at The Container Store, which is the most on-the-nose name for a place of commerce since I hung out at The Coffee House in Lincoln the summer of 1996. My shifts were typically six hours, and they could be at any time the store was open or closed, which meant overnights or every Thursday at 5:00 a.m. I was itching to write, but I could only pull it off if my shifts were in the afternoon and evening, as after work, I had no energy or focus.

I didn’t want to be one of those writers who talks about writing but never writes. Writing isn’t work to me or a duty or something I have to do; it’s a process that brings me joy. Every day I couldn’t do it left me frustrated and depressed, leading me into deep planning mode. I noted that, because I’m crashing from my day, the only thing I do in the evening is watch TV or scroll slack-jawed through the internet. My solution was this: hack off that part of the day and gift it to myself on the other end when I have the energy.

Now, at four in the morning, I wake up and get ready, and by 4:30 (I’m a boy), I sit down at my desk or on my stoop, weather permitting, and this was my time to write, every day. I could write a lot or a little, as long as I was writing. I could scribble, “I got nothing” in a notebook for two hours, and it would count as writing. Several months ago, I started drawing, which crowded the writing from my schedule. Now, at 6:30, when I usually need a break, I hop the train to work and draw at my desk until I clock in at eight. The hour at my desk is important because I use my time in the ungodly early hours of the morning to illustrate my comic, which I can’t and shouldn’t bring with me to work. That leaves me with an hour plus lunch with my sketchbook and no restraints. As much fun as the comic is, it’s nice to branch out and play around a little.

I put a lot of time into being creative, so you’ll understand why a man with a lot to worry about is still pretty content.

Unfortunately, I’m entering a bit of a depressive period. I don’t mean depressed like sad, or even the kind of depression that turns my world into black and white and freezes my joints. Aside from concern over Newcastle, I’m actually doing quite well. The problem is, food doesn’t taste good to me anymore. Music doesn’t sound good to me anymore. The new Guardians of the Galaxy is out, and is apparently pretty good, and I couldn’t give less of a fuck. And yet, even this numb is better than the alternative.

Another sign that I’m on a downswing is that my artistic output goes down. I still work during the aforementioned mornings, but I’m more likely to wrap up early or get pulled into the movie I have on in the background. I’m still cranking out pages—I just filed page 6—but I’m less satisfied with the work I’m producing than I’d be if I were level. I’m still drawing in the morning, but I’ve been setting up my drawing gear for lunch when I’ve changed my mind and skipped it altogether to eat while I work.

It’ll come back, it always does. It’s hardly worth mentioning. Except that Newcastle has been extraordinarily clingy lately, and I don’t want to miss any time with him, so I’m probably not finishing page 7 by Sunday evening. Up until just now, I was cranking out two, maybe three pages a week, but between my inspiration drying up and my muse being such a narcissistic asshole, I’m not finding a lot of time to work on my project.

But my reason for creating art is so I can take pleasure in the craftsmanship, from watching a plot unfold before me to scribbling a circle to stand in for a head while the body takes shape. I got to letter in the word “diarrhea” today, with an accompanying facial expression and pose that really sold the dialogue. If I’m not having fun, there’s no point in doing it, so I’m going to have to take it slow for a while.

And if it means I have to be even slower for the sake of my cat, then I will gladly take my sweet time. Doing it amateur means no deadlines.

Past is Profit

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The nineties are an important decade to me. I went to high school and college and New York in the nineties. Most of my favorite music is from the nineties. I, for one, couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s going through a revival. And, frankly, I’m sick of it.

My streaming services are showing all the same playlists labeled “90s nostalgia.” All the movies I remember from that decade are being converted into TV series or further sequels (True Lies the series? Come on! Does anyone my age or older remember the plot of that movie? No, they remember Jamie Lee Curtis stripping and Arnold Schwarzenegger making quips as he murdered people, not the generic hotties in the TV show being chaste like all TV shows and movies these days—but that’s another rant.)

The nineties are fucking everywhere, with major brands getting in on it and middle-aged celebrities coming out of their coffins and getting botox. I imagine this must be how LGBTQ people feel about Pride Month, when all the corporations put rainbows on their packaging and continue to give money to hateful, bigoted politicians.

I feel like this is my time, and I can be the old-man expert on the decade, but young people don’t want to listen to me.

On the other hand, my soon-to-be-published novel, Hanííbááz Rising, is set in 1995. I love that teenagers are seeking out and trading CDs like my generation did with vinyl records. (Millennials didn’t really get to do this because nostalgia for the eighties meant tapes, which were the single worst way to store music.)

But I know I’m being pandered to, and that never fails to piss me off.

Man’s Best Friend

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I just got a second opinion about Newcastle’s latest health crisis. He’s nineteen years old with a congenital heart condition and now hyperthyroidism. None of the treatments are particularly savory—either for price or how difficult they’re going to make Newcastle’s life. I don’t want to buy more time with him by making him miserable and confused. (“Why is father sticking his finger down my throat?”) And I can’t imagine he’s got long anyway.

When I asked my regular vet what would happen if I chose not to treat it, she gave me a huge guilt trip. When she was listing the treatments, she mentioned a topical ointment, but when I asked about it and told her it was the most appealing, she shamed me for not caring about my cat. A little discomfort a couple of times a day is better than all the suffering he would go through if the ointment didn’t work.

When I talked to my parents, they said, “He’s just a cat.” They didn’t say it in a derogatory way, but as a statement of fact. I trust my mother’s impartiality on this issue despite Newcastle earnestly trying to kill her.

So I got a second opinion. This doctor told me about the effect untreated hyperthyroidism could have, especially on his heart. She told me that cat could possibly live five or six years untreated, but not likely. She looked at his medical records and told me Newcastle could live another three years, but a lot less if the hyperthyroidism went untreated. She said it’s in the early stages, so I could just monitor him for a few months. I basically went to a second vet looking for permission not to treat him, what I got instead was peace of mind and total honesty.

I let Newcastle into my backyard this afternoon, and I monitored him the whole time so he didn’t get into any trouble. I watched him, clumsy, slow, and arthritic, explore. His feet walked on loose soil and packed concrete, and he picked and chose which plants to sniff and which ones to snack on. He escaped into the neighbor’s yard before I could stop him, but I lured him out, using myself as bait. I had brought my phone out with me because I expected to be bored. I was not. I was transfixed.

Overwhelmed, he sat down, and I understood what I want. I want my cat to be this happy until it’s time for him to retire. Nothing will ever compete with the jungle outside the back door, but I’m giving him extra scritches, longer cuddles, some human food, and maybe a spa day or two. And if this means making each other miserable for twenty seconds a day, then I’ll do it. I’m not ready for him to go, and if I can buy another three years, then here’s my credit card. On the other hand, I will not extend the life of a suffering animal just because of my feelings.

Newcastle is not suffering, though. He got to see the backyard. Life is good. I ordered the ointment.

Convenience Store Maniac: an Ode

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It’s only natural to mourn the things you loved and are no longer with you, whether it be a person, a pet, a childhood house, etc.

Convenience Store Maniac was a semi-autobiographical portrayal of a man working at an S-Mart gas station and convenience store too seriously. who only lives for his job. One day he snaps, believing that commerce is a religion, and he is the but a humble minister. This means an inquisition of sorts with his regular customers, some of whom really piss him off. And then he starts killing people. It was clever and a little over-the-top, and that’s exactly what we were going for.

I remember when Shane first conceived of it, in depraved journals he wrote in during his overnight shift at the convenience store he’d been shipwrecked in. I read a few of the entries, and what I saw was a rambling, incoherent, violent mess, and I told him, “I don’t know what this is, I want in.” I loved what I saw, and together we breathed life into Leonard, playing to each other’s strengths, arguing over the use of a single word, as well as brainstorming our way around corners we’d painted ourselves into. We named all of the regular customers after classic country-western performers (except for the teenage assholes, who were Kurt, Chris, and Dave). Even though the names were never said aloud, they helped shape the personalities of people who got maybe one line in the whole movie. We manufactured and fine-tuned chaos. We wrote the first act, at the end of which Leonard takes his first victim, and then I got married, and my asshole cat broke my hard drive, and the first part of Convenience Store Maniac is lost forever.

What isn’t lost forever is the memory of the long weekends I spent in his house on Bear Town Road twenty years ago, getting baked and joining forces with my best friend to create something great. We haven’t talked about it in decades, and if we put our minds to it, we could bring it back to life. On the other hand, there’s nothing I could type that will live up to the first fifty pages that lives in my memory.

Mud Simple

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When I was a kid in the mid-eighties in a neighborhood called Indian Hills at the eastern border of Gallup, New Mexico, there were these dirt ditches. One of them was behind my house, and it was like Disneyland for kids who couldn’t go to California.

Every August at that time, we’d get a monsoon, and the eponymous hills of Indian Hills (known colloquially as the Hogbacks) would disgorge thousands of pounds of mud, which would flow down the street, mix with the ditches, and pour down our cul du sac like a river, and when the clouds parted, all that was left was a thick layer of muck.

It was glorious. My friends, Eric from a block over would join me, along with Will, who lived on the other side of the neighborhood, and Max, the coolest guy I knew, who lived at the end of our cul du sac, would join my sisters and me in this celebration of unbridled ickiness. I remember finding cat poop buried in these ditches. When we got hungry, my parents hosed us off, and we could come inside again. It was the most fun we’d have all year.

In 1986, we moved away, but two years later, we returned to rent a house identical to our previous one, only across the street. And those assholes had paved the ditches and installed drainage so that the mud was directed in an orderly fashion into what passed for the Rio Puerco, the river that was technically not there. I was twelve at the time and on the cusp of being over that kind of thing (thirty-five years later, this is decidedly not true), but I still enjoyed the majesty of those mini-mountains gifting us kids with the thing we wanted most: to become utterly disgusting.

Never again.

I know why they did it. The mudslides crippled the neighborhood every year, like clockwork. It took countless dollars to clean it up, and as Indian Hills expanded and grew more popular, that kind of thing just wasn’t acceptable in a functioning city.

But I still remember getting shoved into the muck by Max, who would get shoved in return, and shouting and being a goddamned kid, and I remember it being taken away from me, and this being my first real taste of how adults can suck the fun out of everything.